We're Everywhere, Us: Liverpool's 2014/15 Season Told Through the Stories of Fans and Foe

By Sachin Nakrani and Karl Coppack

A diary of Liverpool Football Club's 2014/15 season, with a difference. The book may kick off with a chapter on the season opener and end with the last game; but this diary isn't written by a single author. Nor does it focus heavily on the actual soccer. Instead, We're Everywhere, Us is a collaboration—a compilation of pieces offering a different personal take on what it means to support Liverpool. Friendship. Family. Travel. Tragedy. Work. Each piece is a long, rich read, completely unique and distinct from those that precede and follow it. Some of the finest writers on Liverpool FC are involved, including Simon Hughes, Kevin Sampson, Melissa Reddy, Paul Tomkins, Mike Nevin, and Steve Kelly. There are also contributions from Liverpool supporters living abroad, which gives We're Everywhere, Us a truly international feel—while opposition fans add yet another perspective on Liverpool FC's season, our captivating city and proud history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jan 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781785311017

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17 August 2014, Liverpool 2 Southampton 1

‘My mum gave him a bacon butty. He still talks about it today’

By Karl Coppack

Well, here we are again. It’s new season time and I’m more than up for it. It’s been a long summer of World Cups and Commonwealth Games but that’s all done now. That was merely the undercard. This is what we’ve been waiting for. The real fun is about to begin. This is it.

The day augurs well. Liverpool are already ahead of Manchester United before a ball has been kicked. Their 2-1 defeat to Swansea led to some pretty swift volte-faces on Radio 5 yesterday, from saviour to sally in one game, so we’re already smirking. On Radio 5 Danny Mills was talking about how confident Louis Van Gaal looked and how David Moyes always looked a bit nervous. This is completely the opposite to what he said last season.

Spare a thought for Ashley Young, though. I wouldn’t want to wish that on anyone.

Anyway, sod them. Today’s all about Liverpool. It’s about seeing my mates again and getting back into the matchday routine.

I’m looking forward to seeing one mate in particular. Today I’m going to the game with my mate Gerry. This is a big deal for the both of us. We’re finally going to Anfield together. This is something that’s been planned for 34 years. Let me explain.

In 1980, Gerry and I started at the Liverpool Institute. We arrived as milk-coloured first-years – all blazers and uncomfortable ties. We were both 11 years old and excited and petrified by the smells, the noises and the sheer grown-upness of a new school. Following years of junior school we had to start again – making new friends, fighting people for the sake of status and talking about ‘break’ instead of ‘playtime’. Gerry and I became mates simply because our surnames fell close together in the register. Sometimes that coincidence is enough to begin a lifelong friendship.

The Liverpool Institute. It sounds grand, doesn’t it? The Liverpool Institute. The Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, to be exact. You’re probably picturing boaters and school songs along with hampers from home and pupils called Chaudley Minor. You’d be wrong. The name and history of the school were in stark contrast to the reality of what went on there in September 1980. The building fell into the L1 postcode bracket but if you crossed the road at the back of the schoolyard you’d stand in the shadow of the Anglican cathedral in L8 – Toxteth.

Us ‘newts’ (first-years) were thrown slap bang into the riots. It was the second year of an unwelcome Conservative government – a government that would soon discuss cutting the city off and allowing it to fall into ‘a managed decline’. By the end of our first year the area went up in flames. That said, it wasn’t all bad. We were made aware of the benefits of looting. There was an awful lot of stolen Mars Bars going around the yard back then.

Talk about growing up quickly. From Willo the Wisp and Blue Peter to petrol bombs and police cordons. This isn’t what our parents wanted. This was the Institute. This was about possible Oxbridge entrance. Two Beatles went to the ‘Inny’. Charles Dickens gave readings there. The headmaster wore a cloak at assembly. We did Latin. You could do Russian – Russian! – in the third year.

In reality, though, the place was falling to pieces around our ears. The teachers were, well, unusual. One had a car engine next to his desk. Another was about 300 years old and would let you walk out of the lesson and play football if you were bored. Our science teacher once told us that he fully expected to be dead by the end of the school year. We were 11 years old. This was far removed from Goodbye Mr Chips.

In 1985, my O Level year, the school closed down. Gerry had long since gone by then. He made it through a part of the opening term of our second year but just disappeared. One day our form teacher told us that he’d gone to Breckfield Comprehensive School. There was no farewell from him. No phone call. No nicety. School kids don’t betray things like that. There must always be a cruel detachment. I was not to see him again for another 31 years.

I was disappointed. Our little gang was a man down but by then we were older and picking on the new intake of newts, so life moved on. Every now and then Gerry’s name would come up but that was about it. Several years later I was on a bus when I saw him crossing Sheil Road, but didn’t get off to say hello.

I would often go to his house when I made my way to school, travelling from Croxteth to Kensington. We’d walk through Edge Hill and the back of the hospital. For years I never made the connection between Gerry leaving school and the haunted look he threw over his shoulder at his dad and stepmother when he left the house. See, I was never invited into the house. He’d hurry out of the door and would gulp quietly, as if shaking off a demon or two. Then he turned into Gerry again – laughing, punching me in the arm for no reason other than that he could and just generally being an irritating pre-pubescent child. I just assumed that his family were as poor as mine and would rather not share stories. My dad had been made redundant from the Liverpool Docks and Harbour Company a year earlier and work was difficult to come by. I knew that Gerry’s dad was working, but maybe he too was struggling. Maybe it had something to do with his stepmother. Gerry had hinted that his stepmother was a bit of a harridan, but he’d soon change the subject.

One thing we did have in common was football. Gerry could play. I could fake. He played for the school team and I could watch. Liverpool would end that season as European champions and all we wanted was to go to Anfield and see the Reds. Gerry had left before I was finally allowed to go to the match so we never shared that pleasure. Today, we’re finally going to do just that. It only took 34 years. That glimpse of him from a bus was the last I saw of him until 2012.

One day I did a bit of online stalking and put his name into Facebook’s search engine. There he was. The same russet red hair, albeit aged. Grown-up Gerry. I sent a friend request and within minutes he sent me a message asking if it was really me. How many Karl Coppacks from Liverpool did he know, I wondered. Over the next few hours he told me about what happened when he left the Institute. There was no Breckfield Comp.

One afternoon, in the winter of 1981, he went home and found his clothes shoved into Kwik Save bags. His dad threw them at him and told him that he was no longer welcome. Confused, Gerry asked him where he was supposed to go. ‘Your mother’s.’ He hadn’t seen his mother since he was four years old. She wasn’t well and had been in hospital and care for years but he had no idea where. He might as well have been told to go and find the Golden Fleece.

His dad, not shy at showing his fists, didn’t find it unusually cruel to put his son on to the streets in the dead of winter. Gerry didn’t argue either, save for the confused questions of a child. He knew what would happen if he did. He would often come to school with the odd bruise or cut but 12-year-olds are always subject to the odd scrape so no one ever suggested anything might be wrong. Gerry was homeless and soon to be hungry.

For two days and nights he wandered the streets, trying in vain to bunk on the Isle of Man ferry. He then walked to Speke airport and back, sleeping rough in Sefton Park. He survived on stolen milk from doorsteps. He was settling in for a third night when two policemen approached him. He made up some cock-and-bull story as he didn’t fancy another beating from home. They took him to the police station, fed him and tried to put him somewhere where he wasn’t at risk.

There were no available foster homes or much of a social services system back then so he was placed in the only free place – a young offenders’ institute. From one institute to another. Of course, he wasn’t an offender but over time he became institutionalised and was treated the same as everyone else. A few weeks into his time in the facility he received a letter and a fiver from his dad asking why he hadn’t been in touch. Some people aren’t cut out to be parents. Some people aren’t cut out to be decent human beings either. Some people should be in jail.

Again, the signs were there for me to see. One day, a few weeks before his life changed, he travelled across the city to visit me. My parents were less than pleased at the ten minutes’ notice I’d given but were courteous when he arrived. My mum gave him a bacon butty. He still talks about it today. Ordinarily when he would come home his stepmother would feed her own children before him, and even when there was extra she would throw it on to the fire and send him to bed beaten and hungry. He was effectively being starved, so the simple episode of a mother feeding a child as mine did was an all too irregular occurrence. He never spoke of it and I never asked. I wasn’t really into reality at that age. All I wanted to do was listen to The Beatles and talk about Ray Kennedy and Doctor Who. I had no idea that my mate was living in such appalling circumstances.

So today is Gerry’s first Anfield game since the mid-1980s. He was allowed an escorted visit out at weekends so, with no family to visit, chose the ground of the European champions. Last season we went up to Hull to shout at Victor Moses, but today is all about an overdue day out at the place we always talked about.

In February we travelled up to Liverpool for a school reunion organised by our own George Sephton – himself an old boy. On the way I asked Gerry two questions. Firstly, why the hell did he book the Adelphi hotel (it was deemed posh when he lived in Liverpool) and secondly, how did he feel about going back home. He hadn’t been home for years but saw the trip as a chance to exorcise some demons. We met some old mates and had a fantastic night. We even managed to get a guided tour of the school, now the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA) and no longer looking like a museum for fallen masonry. I kept an eye on Gerry for obvious reasons. He told me that seeing the lads and the school left him feeling cheated. Our school history didn’t include him and it should have done.

My oldest mate Chee, also from Croxteth, was with us that night. I’d taken my first trip to Anfield with him in 1981 and shared many celebrations and disappointments over the years. That first game was also against Southampton. Gerry should have been with us back then. We’re making amends today.

It’s an early start. I like a 3pm Saturday kick-off but as today is a 1.30pm game I’m picked up at 7am. A few of the other lads are on their way up too but from different starting places in the capital. Simon and Tony are picking up Steven at Banbury. Mart and Richard are coming up from Haywards Heath while Sachin is on a coach somewhere, feeling all smug because he has his first ever season ticket. Ideally, we should all meet at a service station on the way up but we’re not too good at this and Gerry and I end up getting to Liverpool hours before anyone else.

Liverpool is quiet. Very, very quiet. There’s hardly any traffic. There was no queue at The Rocket. This is odd. We head for my mum’s. This is a necessary visit.

Flashback 24 hours. My sister has left my tickets at my mum’s so I call her to make sure that she’ll be in. ‘Do you want something to eat after the game?’ She probably thinks Gerry is still a poor, starving waif rather than a grown man of 45 who now has his own building business and a degree from London Guildhall. I decline as we want to get back on the road once we’ve dropped the tickets off afterwards.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, mum. Thanks though.’

‘OK luv.’

The city awakes. Anfield is a great place to be before a match. There’s laughter and moaning in equal measure and a riot of red and white. We visit my mates outside The Sandon and discuss the key points of the day – the inclusion of Lucas, crown green bowls and the character of Mother Teresa. Then we’re in! Anfield! The greatest ground in the world! We’re also in the worst seats in the ground.

There’s even more ire coming. The club’s mascot, Mighty Red, is now included in the on-pitch photos. Yes, I know it’s harmless. Yes, I know it’s for the kids and not for a curmudgeon like me, and yes, I know that a charity is involved somewhere. But please, can we have no more of this? Mascots on the pitch just bring us a step closer to celebration music at goals and half-time cheerleaders. I didn’t need a mascot to make me feel part of the club when I was a kid. I had Kevin Keegan. This is a worrying development. Bolton have a man dressed as a six-foot lion who dances when they score. I’ve always been glad that we didn’t do that. Liverpool doesn’t need added razzamatazz.

I’m still not happy with us having a scoreboard in the Kemlyn stand. All a bit too futuristic for me.

And then there was the game. You know what happened. We got through despite a performance that was as flat as Norfolk. I like the look of Javi Manquillo and Jordan Henderson fills my heart with nothing but joy. But we’re very, very rusty and in dire need of another striker. Dejan Lovren, a debutant today, looks suitably scary, which I’m convinced is half the job for centre-halves. He also likes to shout at Simon Mignolet, so we’re already firm friends.

One thing that does have to change is Glen Johnson. I used to love Glen Johnson. Gifted, useful and integral at times, but when he’s bad he stinks the place out. There were numerous occasions today when he was still strolling back from an attack, leaving Lovren to cover two players at once.

I’m also not convinced that Lucas and Steven Gerrard on the same pitch makes sense. Joe Allen gave us a lot more energy when he replaced the Brazilian so I’d like to see more of him. It’s also OK to rest Steven from time to time. That may be seen as a heretical view in some quarters but it’s something that should at least be considered.

Anyway, 2-1. Third in the league. Good.

After the match Gerry and I had some chips on the walk back to the car. I’m trying to eat more healthily these days and haven’t eaten bad matchday food since the final game of last season. I felt a bit sick and very stuffed by these over-salted chips. They were a mistake. Bilious and sluggish, I rang the bell at my mum’s house.

You’re ahead of me, aren’t you?

She’d prepared a full roast dinner. The works. The absolute works. You can’t say no to your mother.

We could barely walk back to the car. And I still forgot to give her the tickets.

Day one and it has to get better.

25 August 2014, Manchester City 3 Liverpool 1

Well, that wasn’t great. There was a slight worry about the rather laboured win against Southampton and to follow it up with a trip to the champions so early in the season was clearly a step too far. I’d hoped that there would be parallels with Manchester United’s early visit to Anfield last season which set us up for a fearful run, but tonight we played a better team and it showed.

I couldn’t be doing with a long post-match autopsy so trundled off to bed. It was then that I made a mistake. I went on to Twitter. Here be dragons.

Twitter is an odd thing. Being that you yourself control your timeline it’s difficult to blame anyone when you read such extraordinary views. I keep my ‘Following’ number down to a manageable level and always make sure that the funny, the reasoned and informative get on there, so I was surprised at some of the arse gravy that flowed down the page.

It seems that I was alone in consigning the defeat as an ‘oh, well’ reverse. It seems that we won’t win anything now. It seems that we’ve bought the wrong players. It seems that we’ve set them up incorrectly. It seems that we’ve blown it and it also seems that Glen Johnson is as close to being Satan without the necessary diabolical tattoos.

I can understand people being deflated, angry or just downright sulky when things don’t go our way, but this is absurd. It’s from times like this that prejudices form.

Don’t get me wrong here. I like a moan. There are many people who throw my old sentences back at me to emphasise this point but this seems a little strong. And premature.

I suppose this is only to be expected. As far back as May a few of my mates were discussing whether 2013/14 was our only and final chance at the title. Compounded by an empty number seven shirt, there’s an air of defeatism in certain quarters before a ball has been kicked. It took just one defeat against superior opposition before panic set in.

Fans are notoriously bipolar when it comes to expectation. My mate tells me of the day he sat next to an old boy at Anfield. This man had sat through titles, Europe, cups and some of the finest football ever seen. His response to the poor game they’d seen? ‘Thirty years I’ve been watching this shite.’

I love that. I like a cantankerous curmudgeon, but it would be churlish indeed to write us off so soon. At least give us till Christmas. This game was our first away league defeat this calendar year. I’ll take that.

Negativity is fine. Moaning is fine. I just hope that Brendan and his team aren’t as down as some of our lot tonight. You learn from mistakes (Alberto Moreno) and from better players.

This was a defeat, not the final act of a tragedy.

I’m sleeping fine.

KC

31 August 2014, Tottenham 0 Liverpool 3

‘These are a few of my favourite things’

By Martin Cloake

‘Joey Ate The Frogs Legs Made The Swiss Roll Now Hes Munching Gladbach’. That banner in the Liverpool section at the 1977 European Cup Final is one of my earliest memories of football’s terrace culture. I was 12, and the game was on the telly.

In those days clubs hadn’t turned into brands and football wasn’t up itself, so when an English team was in a European match we tended to get behind them. Liverpool were in quite a lot of European matches in those days, as well as frequent main features on Match of the Day or The Big Match. So they were one of the first teams other than Spurs that registered with me in any detail.

The players I remember in the red shirts were the exciting ones; John Toshack, Steve Heighway, Kevin Keegan, Kenny Dalglish. But for all the allure of those players, Liverpool’s red machine was founded on the 1-0 win, the shutout, what the Spurs legend Danny Blanchflower would have called ‘waiting for the other side to die of boredom’.

There was a bit of a myth that grew up around Liverpool as the media obsessed with their success, a myth tied in with the image of the chirpy Scouser, the wit and energy of a city with a rich cultural heritage. That, in turn, led to a growing resentment, something which grew around me as I began the journey from innocent pre-teen to streetwise teen. Stories of dodgy days out to Scouseland began to filter back as I began to mix with the lads and older fans who travelled. They told stories of kids with knives, kids who’d offer to ‘watch yer car, mister’ and then have it away with your hub caps, being ‘taxed’ for your trainers or a nice bit of clobber. And if you were a black Londoner, you got it especially bad.

In Liverpool and London, we were two tribes; thieving Scouse bastards, flash Cockney twats. And the tribes laid claim to leadership in fashion, music, humour, football…anything you could think of was turned into an example of why ‘we’ were better than ‘you’. It was, as many of us came to realise, just a game; one-upmanship or, before the word became indistinguishable from ‘being a prejudiced prick’ – banter. It’s what you did if you were a working-class male, you took the piss as a way of breaking the ice. The sociologists would call it the peacock strut, the male need to manoeuvre for position and influence. We called it getting over yourself – not being a dick, a divvy, a muppet, a soft lad.

And what all this meant was that, beneath it all, we were pretty much the same. We had the same values about loyalty and attachment, the same passion for our music and our clobber, and for our football clubs. That became more apparent as many of us got older, but at the time many of us were caught up in it. We were kids. But there are many ways to be shaped by the times we lived in, and growing up through the 1980s also meant that Liverpool was always in my field of vision.

Even at the time I knew Thatcher would be a disaster for the country, and I was right. My family was one of the few round our way not to be mesmerised by the Thatcherite revolution. It’s hard to write convincingly of how divisive those times were but, even though I grew up in the London suburbs rather than an industrial town, it soon became clear that in the war that had been declared we had to take sides. So I did, becoming politicised at an early age and actively involved in a range of left-wing political movements. And if you were on the left in the 1980s, you knew about Liverpool and identified with it. It was a working-class city where solidarity was important, and so in the Thatcherite plan it had to be destroyed. Thatcher, the great patriot, ready to sacrifice the citizens of her country for multinational capital.

Toxteth went up, Brixton went up, local authority unions fought back, two labour movement strongholds fought tooth and nail to hold on to the things we had created, the values we had embedded. We got a kicking. Around me, people retreated into their ghettos – buying into the line peddled by the Tories that all our problems could be blamed on whatever ‘other’ they had decided needed persecuting.

Too many embraced the image of ‘flash Cockney wankers’, a shift demonstrated starkly by the adoption of Harry Enfield’s satirical strike at working-class Toryism, ‘Loadsamoney’, as a cultural icon to be aspired to. Spurs fans, along with fans of other London clubs, took to waving tenners at visiting teams from the north, and Liverpool really had it stuck to them.

‘Sign on, sign on, with a pen, in your hand, and you’ll never work, again, you’ll never work, again,’ sang the terrace wits from a capital city in which urban deprivation and unemployment were also rocketing. Banter. One-upmanship. But now it seemed to be a little more.

And all the while the Liverpool FC media love-in seemed to continue. As the fanzine movement burgeoned, there was a fanzine called Liverpool Are On The Telly Again, produced by Norwich City fans. Liverpool were undoubtedly successful, but it was the apparently uncritical adulation in the media that rankled with many fans.

Some of that was, without doubt, the familiar backlash against anyone or anything that has been judged too successful. But we knew about the darker side of the Liverpool support too and it seemed that was never acknowledged. And that cocktail of resentment led to the afternoon at Plough Lane when Spurs and Wimbledon fans joined together to sing ‘We hate Scousers and we hate Scousers’ as news of deaths at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough was announced on the half-time PA system. The announcement used the word ‘riot’ and the reaction on the terraces was ‘here they go again’.

For all that, we resented the way all football fans were treated back in those days – as hooligans waiting to happen. At Spurs we were perhaps quicker to realise the truth. In 1981 it was nearly us caught in the tunnel and crushed in the pens at that very same ground. Eight years later the lessons still had not been learned but now 96 people were dead and they could not be ignored, as we had been.

When football resumed, Everton came to White Hart Lane. An impromptu delegation of Spurs fans took a wreath to the away end and presented it. In memory of your loss. Petty divisions were exposed for what they were. The gates at White Hart Lane had been particularly heavily festooned with scarves and banners and messages in the days after Hillsborough. And 20 years on, as the fight for justice continued – the passage of time itself a stark indication of the contempt in which the people of this country are held by those who consider themselves our rulers and betters – it was testimony from Spurs fans that played a part in forcing another look at what had unfolded and why.

History is shaped by those who tell it. So my view of Liverpool, which I’ve tried to set out here, is very much a personal take. But I have always had a soft spot for the place. I’ve spent relatively little time there, so I’ll concede that what I like is an idea of the place as much as what I have found on my visits. And that the idea is possibly a little idealised. But I don’t think it’s rose-tinted. I know not everyone in Liverpool is a Scouse wit, a musical genius, a committed socialist. But I’m a city boy, and I like the energy and the mix of a city that’s confident in itself.

I’m a Londoner through and through, but my reference points have a strong Scouse flavour running through them. Kevin Sampson and Peter Hooton writing in The End and The Face back in the early days; the Partizan media collective; Phil Thornton; the Head brothers; Echo and the Bunnymen; a fascination with Adidas trainers; terrace anthems; jangly-pop four-piece bands…these are a few of my favourite things.

But what, you may well ask, about the football? In the early 1980s, when the great Spurs team of Hoddle, Ardiles and Perryman and all the rest of the boys from White Hart Lane firmly hooked me on football, it was us and Liverpool. For three years we slugged it out to be the top dogs in English football. If you want to argue about who came out on top, you don’t really understand anything I’ve written. Those were the days, my friends, and they were bloody brilliant.

There have been great times since, in particular the 1995 FA Cup quarter-final victory at Anfield. Two great goals from Jurgen Klinsmann and Teddy Sheringham and a fine performance that had the Kop applauding the Lilywhites off the pitch as one of the largest travelling contingents I’d ever been part of went wild in the Annie Road. In contrast, I remember a cold, strange night at a half-empty Anfield during which Spurs swept aside a Roy Evans side in the dying days of his tenure. We actually worried for Liverpool after that.

Games between Spurs and Liverpool have tended to be exciting, open affairs. And, in more recent years, the edge has come from two teams fighting to regain a little of what they once had, two sides on the brink but not quite able to cross into the promised land.

The football memories have been some of the best, and the trips to the city some of the best, too. Even when we got kicked out of a hotel on the Albert Dock with raging hangovers at about 4am after someone in the 40-strong hen party staying there had sparked up a ciggie in their room and set the alarms off.

One of the many things I think links the folk cultures of Liverpudlians and Londoners is the pleasure in having the craic, exchanging stories and chewing over the facts, so here’s one of my favourite anecdotes. It’s one which you’ll get if you get it, if you know what I mean.

Quite a few seasons back, around the time of football’s second summer of love, a few of us got the train up to Liverpool for the match. We took the early out of Euston, and there was a pretty large contingent of the Liverpool London Supporters’ Club aboard. A few of the fellas were standing in the space between the carriages, having the odd spliff and a few cans, and so we shot the breeze with the through traffic.

It was all good natured, but inevitably there was some discussion about the stereotypes of Scousers and Cockneys – the cartoon characters we were often reduced to. There was a bit of friendly stick exchanged, but we all agreed that stereotyping any set of people was wrong.

Arriving at Lime Street, fresh from our philosophical discussions and display of liberal understanding – together, it must be said, with the spring in the step engendered by a few cheeky fresheners partaken on the train – we strode into the pub opposite Lime Street station. Most of us sat down at a table by the door having despatched two of our party to the bar with our order. Our bums had barely touched the vinyl seat covering when the door burst open and in walked a bloke with a bubble perm and a moustache, wearing a shellsuit and brandishing a tracksuit top which still had the security tag attached. ‘Any of youse lads wanna buy some gear, like?’ he asked. We pissed ourselves.

Sunday lunchtime kick-offs aren’t right. Not enough time to do much before or after the game, so the day’s written off. But football demands a lot these days on many levels. It takes me an hour to get to White Hart Lane, changing at Highbury and Islington where I believe some other side relocated to. That’s another Liverpool memory; Michael Thomas’s last-minute winner giving Arsenal the first title of their modern era of success. I was living in Edmonton at the time so I should have been safe, but waking into my local I was confronted by four suited-up Gooners taking their wives out to celebrate the title. Thanks a bunch ya Scouse muppets!

I like the early season games, seeing the familiar faces gather again – off the pitch at least – and catching up on everyone’s summer over a few beers in the Irish Centre. As my mate Bruce says, it’s the best of times, before reality has taken the edge off the hope.

In truth, we know it’s going to be a test. We’ve beaten two poor sides in our previous two league games. But Liverpool haven’t looked great either. So today’s a test for both sides. And it’s one that Spurs comprehensively fail.

Liverpool out-press us and also manage to find greater width in their diamond formation than we do in our 4-2-3-1. Mario Balotelli is making his debut and works harder than I’ve seen him work since he was driving his studs down into Scott Parker’s head a few years ago at the Etihad. Raheem Sterling is on fire, Jordan Henderson running everywhere, and the old-stager Steven Gerrard is pulling the strings.

Defensive numbskullery leads to a first goal. And on it went, Liverpool chasing and running and squeezing and creating and Spurs leaderless and clueless. Still, it’s only 1-0 at half-time and we have created a few chances – one lifted on to the roof of the net by Emmanuel Adebayor and one fired at the optimum saving height by Nacer Chadli after a neat through ball from Nabil Bentaleb.

The second half starts badly. Very badly. After the linesman misses a blatant offside, Joe Allen runs into the area and performs a physics-defying dive to get the softest penalty you’ll ever see given after being brushed by Eric Dier’s finger. After the game, the analysis from so-called football experts seems to conclude that Allen ‘had the right to go down’. To not understand this is, apparently, to be naïve in the extreme. The ‘right to go down’, after being slightly brushed, in a contact sport. Ironic when you think of the assaults regularly perpetrated on Gareth Bale which got him labelled a diver by many, including our fine corps of professional referees and, on one occasion, an unusually gormless Anfield crowd who booed his every touch.

I’m not totally enamoured with everything the Red Scouse do, see.

Gerrard puts the penalty away, Spurs exude their familiar ‘Well that’s that then, what are you doing after work?’ aura and it’s game over even before Andros Townsend sets up Alberto Moreno for his debut goal just to make sure. It finishes 3-0. It’s better than the 5-0 and 4-0 last season. And it’s an improvement. If we keep improving the result at this rate we should be good for a draw towards the middle of 2016.

It’s a reality check for Spurs, and cause for rueful reflection. Just a few seasons ago we’d overtaken Liverpool – more often favourites to win against them than not, securing higher finishes in the league, playing better, more attractive football. But after new owners moved in to stop the rot, a new manager was appointed and, importantly, the new board gave him the time if not at first the resources to do his job. And he stayed patient with his board, earning the right to greater backing.

This was his 100th game in charge, for the new Spurs manager – a cliché of modern football if ever there was one – it was the fifth. For Spurs fans the hope that we could learn a lesson from a club that seemed to have learned its lessons was all we had. We’ll have better days than this, but it didn’t make the lack of fight or guile any more palatable.

I was supposed to meet up with some of the Spirit of Shankly crew after the game. They’re a decent bunch with a great campaigning spirit and a bright, shining humanity. Respect between them and the newly-revitalised Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust was cemented when they unfurled a banner bearing the name of former Trust chairman Darren Alexander, who died tragically young, on the Kop at the end of last season. We know how valuable a symbol that is. But I didn’t get the text until I was on the train home, and in truth it was probably best to leave them to the carousing. A few tweets I saw later that night suggested there was plenty of it.

So that was Liverpool at the Lane, Liverpool Football Club as yer actual Scousers so often say it. We’ve got a trip to their city to come midwinter. And the crew from the Irish are already booked up for the last game of the season – the title decider we’re calling it – on Bank Holiday weekend, the weekend of Sound City. But that’s against Everton.

13 September 2014, Liverpool 0 Aston Villa 1

‘The animals openly mocked us’

By Sachin Nakrani

If anybody wants proof of football’s ability to turn optimism into hopelessness, the sublime into the ridiculous, grown adults into childlike souls, cold and desperate for home, then it was all there to see on the edge of the M6 on this autumn night. Keele services to be precise, where 21 men of varying ages found themselves under the glare of artificial light, eating pizza in the early hours and wondering precisely what they had done to deserve this fate.

Seriously, a Mancunian or Evertonian couldn’t have scripted it. Here we were, a coachload of Liverpool supporters returning to London after seeing our team lose in dispiriting fashion against Aston Villa when the lights went out. Literally. The coach (or glorified minibus to be precise) descended into darkness not long after we had got on the motorway and soon our Bulgarian driver (he was really excited about coming back for Ludogorets on Tuesday) made it clear that we were in trouble. The power was going, first inside and now, slowly but surely, outside. Soon there would be no headlights and eventually no movement at all. We had to stop.

So we pulled into the nearest service station, which was Sandbach in Cheshire. En route, the driver (I really should know his name by now, he’s taken us on enough trips) called his boss and told him about the problem. The boss, Jerry, told him to call him back as soon as he pulled in, which he did. Except now Jerry wasn’t picking up his phone. It was a little before 9pm and we wouldn’t hear from Jerry for close to an hour. In the meantime we discovered that our Bulgarian friend had no breakdown cover and, calling Jerry aside, no contingency plan to deal with such a situation. To say we were pissed off would be an understatement: there were swear words, demands for explanations and cries of illegal practice. Some even went inside and got a McDonald’s.

Then it got mad. Shortly after a group of Villa fans pointed out that Liverpool had just been ‘fucked up the arse’, a huge lorry pulled up carrying crate upon crate of lambs. As the female driver (blonde, posh, clearly not interested in our plight) headed inside, the animals openly mocked us. OK, they were ‘baahing’, but these were no ordinary ‘baahs’ – they were laced with sarcasm and a distinct hint of piss-taking. Imagine a snotty teenager screaming ‘aaah!’ seconds after tripping you up on the pavement. It sounded just like that.

It was only after the cruel lambs had come and gone that Jerry finally made contact. He told Riyaz, the leader of our group,